TESTIMONIES

Testimonies, first-hand accounts by witnesses to genocide, are considered to be some of the most powerful resources in genocide education to help students connect the history of genocide to real people, real places, and real stories. Testimonies have been called “the formative center of genocide education” because they can make the historic content real through the stories of real people.

MHGE encourages all teachers to incorporate testimonies from genocide survivors (and others who experienced or witnessed the history as it happened) into classroom lessons as often as possible. Teachers are encouraged to use testimonies from sites that are carefully curated by established institutions, such as the USC Shoah Foundation, which has testimonies from the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, and others, including contemporary genocides.

Working with partners around the world, the USC Shoah Foundation (Institute) shares the expertise it has acquired through the collection, indexing, preservation, and dissemination of the testimonies that are currently in the Visual History Archive.

The Institute’s Visual History Archive currently contains video testimonies from the 1915 Armenian Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide. Soon to be added are testimonies from the Cambodian Genocide of the late 1970s and the Guatemalan Genocide of the early 1980s.

Portraits of Honor
Our Michigan Holocaust Survivors is an interactive educational exhibit of the Program for Holocaust Survivors and Families, a service of Jewish Senior Life of Metropolitan Detroit.

Additional Links

Teaching with Testimony

USC Shoah Foundation IWitness Site

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a collection of testimonies from multiple genocides, and can be found by searching the site.